Primitive Broadcast Service - Colors for Chamelions
“City of Clocks,” the opening track on Colors for Chameleons by Milwaukee’s Primitive Broadcast Service, begins and ends with the magnified sound of an electric meter, the everyday apparatus found on any building. The haunting loop of sound sets the stage for the dystopian noise rockers; the vinyl album’s back cover art is a photograph of the trio in a boiler room. At any other time in the history of recorded music they would be identified as masked bandits. Here, the shorthand is simply the music was informed by COVID-19 pandemic.
J.D. Morgan’s weary vocals and alternate-tuned guitar get pushed and pummeled by the rhythm section of Andy Steffenhagen on bass and Bryan Dorn on drums. They remain correspondents in a world turned upside down. “No one is telling good time,” Morgan sings in “City of Clocks,” a tale of two friends, one black and one white, who head out for a night on the town. Instead, they find violence. One of them will be imprisoned and it is not difficult to guess which one.
The band’s raging interpretation of Bob Dylan’s country death ballad “Hollis Brown” is chilling. “Whatever Now” ping-pongs the blasé shrug of “whatever” with the urgency of “now”—modern times in a nutshell. “Chameleon” is the diary of young city-dweller set to a churning beat. Primitive Broadcast Service’s sound is often a densely played soundtrack recalling Mission of Burma or the Velvet Underground, especially with the closer “Bobby Says,” where the hypnotic, 10-minute song unfolds like a short story, quoting Malcolm X.
